This tool is designed to simulate more and more data being received from the heliospheric imagers aboard the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO, Kaiser et al., 2008) as a coronal mass ejection (CME) moves towards Earth. The resulting tracks were used to study the improvement of an HI-based CME arrival prediction when more data becomes available.
The tracking tool initially displays only a subset of the available HI data. The tool allows the user to adjust the contrast of the Jmap to their convenience. After completing five manual measurements of the CME front, the user advances the sequence by clicking a button that reveals the next four hours of data. The scientist then reperforms another five measurements of the same CME front in this extended time range to obtain a new set of five tracks. This process is repeated until the maximum track length is reached, that is, until the CME can no longer be followed.
To create the conda environment to run the program in, switch to the CME_Tracking folder and execute the following commands:
conda create -n "cme_tracking" python=3.9.17 ipython
conda activate cme_tracking
pip install -r requirements.txt
The tracking tool is used from the command line. To run it, switch to the CME_Tracking foler and activate the previously created environment using:
conda activate cme_tracking
The tool can the be used with the following command (date and spacecraft must be specified, and you can check RAL jplot using the ral option instead of aswo):
python track_cme.py 20100202 B aswo/ral
In case you need to stop and come back to an event, simply use the next timestep to go back to the one you stopped at.
For ease of use, all_commands.txt provides the appropriate command for every event. The command can simply be copy-pasted into the terminal to execute the tracking tool for the respective event.
The tool has three buttons at the bottom - one saying 'Save track' (which saves the current track and clears the plot of any tracked points), one saying 'Next timestep' (which loads the next 4 timesteps and clears the plot of any tracked points), and one saying 'Close' (which closes the tool). Note that clicking 'Next timestep' DOES NOT save the current track - if you wish to proceed to the next timestep, the track must be saved using 'Save track' beforehand. All tracks are saved in an automatically created folder named 'tracks', in sub-folders with names corresponding to the event's respective HELCATS ID.
On top of the J-map, the number of saved tracks for the current timestep is displayed. 5 tracks should be created per event and timestep.
Tracking is done using the mouse. Double-clicking places a point, right clicking removes the point placed last.